Regarding Actions and Consequences
by mr-raindrops
Summary: It isn't as simple as one plus one equals two; after all, reactants can yield unexpected products. (Contains character death, mentions of suicide)


**Contains character death and suicide.**

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_Regarding Actions and Consequences_

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Akashi has a dream of a white-tinted world, unreasonably frightening at times, heavy with stiff fabric pressing down on his body, and tingling with a strange feeling balancing precariously on the precipice of realism, but not quite. The dream ends when his eyelids become heavy, and he falls asleep within the dream, which is quite an odd affair, the world receding and dwindling into nothingness.

But before that, there were hitched breaths, a few quiet hiccups, and tepid drops of water trailing paths on the back of his left hand.

He wonders who it is that was crying.

.

.

.

The director's office had been empty when Kuroko entered after numerous unanswered knocks on the door.

It was strange, walking up to that oak desk, the way Nijimura must have when he had stepped down from captaincy. The edges of the resignation form were worn, a result of excessive fidgeting in brooding moments of uncertainty, and he folded it in half, leaving it on the desk.

The finality of the door's quiet _click_ as it shut behind him never gave him the presumed closure, unexpectedly.

There would be times when Kuroko would lie in bed, awake, long past midnight into the early hours of the morning, recalling mistakes in painstakingly clear details - both the others' and his own.

The weight of Akashi's index finger pressing into his sternum was burned into his skin, his bones, his mind, its heaviness making it hard to draw in enough air. Kuroko thought that it would have been gone - it would have made sense - now that he was no longer the sixth man.

He hadn't felt so alone in a long time.

.

.

.

The same dream recurs, but this time, someone's hand, warm and calloused, is draped across his own, fingertips grazing lightly over his skin. The hand then stills, grip tightening, and Akashi can feel his knuckles digging into the palm.

_Don't cry, there's no need to cry_, he wants to say to them.

But the dream ends before he finds the strength to form the words.

.

.

.

Kuroko had told him once, when they were together alone: "you're not perfect, Akashi-kun."

Akashi had simply studied him with amusement tugging at the corners of his lips, as if saying _of course I'm not_, and had evidently decided to humour him. "Then what am I?"

Kuroko could tell by the way the smile he had been suppressing broke out that the response hadn't been what he had been expecting - "you're human."

"And? Your point?"

"You only need to do your best," Kuroko said, feeling somewhat like a child whose whims were simply being indulged, "and that should be enough."

Akashi gave a breathy chuckle, and the sound rang hollow in Kuroko's ears.

"Is it, now?"

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The dreams are short-lived, so Akashi pieces this world together from the fleeting glimpses that he gets into it - the soft murmur of unintelligible voices, the dust motes in the air that turn gold in the sunlight's glow, the abrupt sting in his forearm that vanishes as swiftly as it had come.

It's never enough to make sense, but there is always, always someone beside him, unseen, crying.

He always drifts off to sleep with the memory of a face and a name just a thread's width out of reach.

.

.

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On the first day of high school, Kuroko found himself in front of the map that indicated the locations of each club sign-up table, searching for the basketball club.

He would have liked to think there was nothing of himself to forgive, but the thing is that their negligence all took different forms.

There were so many things he could have done, but did not do.

.

.

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In another dream, someone whispers, a hushed echo, "you're only human."

The tears continue to fall.

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"Akashi-kun, why is it that you always need to win?" Kuroko had asked one evening, sitting at the dining room table of Akashi's modest apartment in Kyoto and cradling a warm cup of green tea.

The angle of the lights coming from the kitchen had given Akashi's eyes an odd shine, making red glint dark gold.

"Why do you need to breathe?"

It's different; winning isn't necessary to live, Kuroko wanted to say - but Akashi's next breath was noticeably shaky, however slight it was. Kuroko clamped his mouth shut and swallowed the words on the tip of his tongue along with a sip of tea, which had been uncharacteristically strong and bitter and seared his tongue painfully with its burning heat.

Because in Akashi Seijuurou's world, perhaps it was.

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In this dream, Akashi is suspended in midair over a bed (in which a boy with blurry features lies), and beside it is a chair (in which a blue-haired boy sits), his body locked in place by invisible threads stitched into his skin, weaving its way into his veins and his blood. Akashi feels like he is drifting further and further from this world, as if falling deeper and deeper into unconsciousness with each consecutive _beep, beep, beep_. Then, there's an anomaly in its steady rhythm, and the sound becomes muffled, until he no longer perceives interludes between the electronic intonations.

Someone starts to cry.

He closes his eyes, and his body drops onto the mattress.

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Seirin lost against Rakuzan. Maybe it was for the best, Kuroko had thought. The teams shook hands with relative amnity, albeit with some sniffling and exasperated heaves of quivering breaths on Seirin's side. It's okay, though, he told himself; they'd tried their best - it was time to move on.

It was not until the next morning, when he had found out that Akashi had been admitted into intensive care from Momoi on the phone, that he thought otherwise.

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"Attempted suicide," Midorima told him while they were visiting, four days after the incident, watching the rising and falling of Akashi's chest.

Kuroko sat down on the chair beside Akashi's bed, and reached out to brush a stray strand of hair away from his forehead. "It could have been different," he said weakly, and cringed at the way it sounded - as if it had just barely escaped Kuroko's pained effort to strangle it down in his throat, although he supposed that it was the truth.

Midorima took a loud breath through his nose, and said, "it could have been the same," with a strained semblance to reassurance.

They sat quietly, the low hum of the air conditioner occasionally puncturing the silence, Midorima's eyes on Akashi and Kuroko's eyes on granules of dust made visible by a stream of sunlight, spinning as if waltzing an exaggeratedly slow dance.

On a day far-off from now - in the past, in the future, in a different universe - Akashi would have been the boy who offered to take the heavy laundry baskets from managers who stumbled under their weight; would have been the boy who smiled as he greeted his teammates in the tired haze of morning practice; would have been the boy who did not become captain, who might have secretly let Midorima win a round of shogi, who kissed the tip of Kuroko's nose when he is awake and not pretending to be asleep, who cried once in a while and let Kuroko stroke his cheekbones - wouldn't have been the boy who was lying on a hospital bed, a result of the conclusion that this way out would be so much more bearable than the dreary way through.

"At one point, you'd realize that even when you strive for your best, you would never be happy with the results," Kuroko found himself saying at some point, when visitor hours were almost over.

.

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He is lying down in this time.

This dream is similar to the ones prior in some aspects, and different in others. The things that are familiar is the soothing knowledge that someone is beside him, and that they are crying. The differences are that the world is darker with the dim lighting and the sweep of black fabric here and there, that his peripherals are lined with flowers, that he cannot feel the warmth of the teardrops that trickle down through the spaces between his knuckles.

Exhaustion washes across him, seeping into the marrows of his bones, and sleep, like an old friend, tugs him away from this place.

There's a sigh, and this time it doesn't contain that surreal echo; it's wistful and yearning and clear, and the voice is so familiar - but Akashi can't quite remember whose voice it belongs to.

"That's why you have to forgive yourself."

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The sound of him flatlining was nothing compared to the silence that followed after.

Kuroko's mind had been blank, except for the haunting string of _sorry, sorry, sorry_.

He stared at the flecks of dust particles, twirling about in the light of a sun about to sink beneath the skyline.

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(That would be Akashi's last dream.)

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**A/N**: fic for Infinite Skye because it's her birthday, so HBD SKYE I HOPE YOU GET 100% ON YOUR TEST AND ESSAY yoDELS I'm very honoured that I had the opportunity to meet you and thank you for being such a wonderful person and friend huehuehue~

Heavily heavily influenced (to the point that it feels like a more subtle form of plagiarism or something IDK LOL but if only it could be as good pfft) by "drop rule" by layqur on AO3 - it's a beautifully written fic so it's a wonderful read if you haven't looked at it yet also thanks to jarofclay42 and pinkcorpse for reading it over for me and for listening to me whine about everything there is to whine about lol coughs

I can't stop portraying Akashi this way but like *lies down*. anyways thanks for putting up with this! =u=


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